pstack

The "employ a hacker to catch a hacker" methodology of hiring is fine, if your hacker is going to catch other hackers. If you're actually just hiring thieves to help themselves to all they can carry in their pockets, then their expertise really isn't relevant beyond their own self-serving exploitation of that knowledge domain.

Goldman Sachs didn't have to convince anyone of anything. They already ran the treasury and the SEC.

No and if you are legitimately shocked, then you don't understand to what extent the government is infiltrated with Goldman Sachs-men.

Goldman Sachs' Revolving Door: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-31727_162-20001981-10391695.html

"A CBS News analysis of the revolving door between Goldman and government reveals at least four dozen former employees, lobbyists or advisers at the highest reaches of power both in Washington and around the world. [. . .] For example, former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is a former Goldman CEO; Arthur Levitt, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission is a now a Goldman adviser; and former House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt is now a paid lobbyist for the firm. "

They then go on to list another 49 high ranking government persons who are Goldman Sachs-men.

Goldman Sachs is only one of the vile companies that have infiltrated the government and dominate all sorts of positions and committees to directly promote their own agendas (or, in some cases, bail their own companies out with trillion dollar plans after using the media to scare-monger the entire country about impending doom if we don't let the Goldman Sachs guys in the government give the Goldman Sachs guys in the company the bailout). There are plenty of other companies, too. Monsanto has a pretty heavy representation, but the list goes on and on. Just get googling and you'll spend days learning of all the unbelievable corruptions that we've been letting go on for decades. A fun one to look up is how corporate employees within the government have used their positions to fast-track things through the FDA for companies that theyw ere employees of (or became employees of as a reward, after they left the public position). Sometimes, even directly against the advice and complaint of the FDA's own scientists. Look up stuff like the rBGH, aspartame, round-up ready monsanto corn seeds, and manipulating data and fast-tracking FDA approvals for companies officials have been cozy with.

There are plenty of other examples that I'm probably not even aware of. These are just some of the most documented and commonly covered.

Yeah, it's wrong to cast aspersions on people who go to work for the government and act as extended arms of the industry and corporations they just left. Like the many Goldman Sachs people on the committee that authorized a trillion dollar bailout for companies that primarily included Goldman Sachs. Or the Monsanto guys who ran the FDA and other government agencies and made sure chemicals like rBGH, aspartame and others (from the DDT/agent orange corporation) were given a green light. There's nothing going on there at all! Why golly, it's just government in action! And the guys from Raytheon and GE certainly have no vested interest in agitating national fears and military spending at all.

Who is surprised?

The committee that granted a trillion dollar bail-out of a few companies including Goldman Sachs was staffed with plenty of current/former executives from Goldman Sachs.

The FDA and agencies involved for approving bovine growth hormone (later found to do freakishly hideous things to the poor cows and increase by incredible amounts the contamination of the milk we drink from infected utters), the Round-Up-ready patented corn seeds, and aspartame just happen to be largely staffed by current/former Monsanto executives.

The FDA and agencies involved in inspecting the food production in the states and making sure that it remains uncontaminated and safe and regularly inspected have reduced the number of inspections by something like 85% and the contamination rates increase, while under the watch of agencies staffed largely by current/former executives of the few main companies being overseen.

The US government is beyond corrupt and beyond any possible reform and nobody cares. Nobody gives a damn that almost every office and committee appointment in the country is a matter of the wolves guarding the sheep. It has been this way for decades and they are now so brazen about it that you can look at every single person in every single job and do a simple search to trace the truth of their position and appointment back and nobody gives a damn.

I mean, seriously, we let them give themselves a trillion dollars. We let them poison our food supply with largely untested and unproven chemicals. We let them cover up and manipulate right in front of our faces and we do nothing. After thirty years of looking the other way on all of these things, what on earth could possibly ever even remotely raise our eyebrows and make us do something other than participate in the attention-occupying busy-body bullshit of "durr durr republicans are stupid and evil" and "durr durr democrats are stupid and evil" my team versus yours bullshit?

Maybe if the government and corporations decided that it was just easier to require that all births be sponsored to make sure they can be cared for until adulthood and then those sponsored children become indentured servants for their sponsor company until the age of 40 . . . maybe . . . MAYBE we might possibly take our eyes off Dancing With the Stars and the football game long enough to do something other than pull the red or blue lever according to the team we've associated ourselves with and demand that we have choices that aren't part of the game and won't be part of the game and will radically change things.

It won't happen in my lifetime. I know that much.

Alternately, if you have the talent and personality, nobody cares what you dress like. At worst, you're eccentric.

I have a hard time believing there is anyone out there in the world who doesn't have the basic common sense to dress themselves well enough to make it at a job interview, a date, or some formal or semi-casual event. Nobody really needs help figuring out the four pieces of clothing that are appropriate and look fine on them, do they? If the advice they're paying for is that basic and simple, then I'm going to start a service where for only $10, I tell you to throw away your stupid junior high school AXE and replace it with something like a nice Bvlgari.

Look at Henry Rollins. Smart guy. A bit eccentric. Looks fine. Does it take a rocket scientist or a hired-hand to tell you that a nice pair of pants and a plain black tee shirt is a good look? Or that untied Converse and sweatpants isn't the way to score points with people who don't know you, yet?

Also, there's a world of difference between "let me dress you like you're my Ken doll, because you have to be hip to the latest fashions in this quarter's fashion magazine" and "hey, don't dress yourself like one of the Kids of Whidney High".

Oh, I know there are guys who are into clothing and hair and all of that, just as much as there are guys who only wear one color of clothing (so everything always matches!) and usually take a trusted female along to make sure they don't do anything too stupid.

But that is a case where someone has chosen to care. If you have an interest in something, it's completely different than someone volunteering their opinion that you suck at it and need someone to do it the right way for you. Especially if it is of no interest to you or you're fine with your own choices, thank-you-very-much. What they're really saying is "let me help you, so that I'll stop judging you".

The gist of my point wasn't that women don't necessarily care about clothes and hairstyles and so on (of course they do) as much as it was that I don't care that they care. You can dress nice and look good without following whatever the latest fashion was dictated to society in this month's GQ and Vogue and unless you're really into primping, you may as well just go with a look that is relatively timeless.

Frankly, you have to determine that you're living your own life at some point and stop caring so much about what everyone else thinks to the point that it impacts the way you even clothe yourself (beyond stuff matching, belonging to this century, and being clean). If anyone here, for example, really cared that much, they'd all be race car drivers and pro athletes.

Depending on the size of your city, you may want to check around. In the places I've lived the past decade (Portland, San Francisco, Denver) stores have had online ordering and delivery for over a decade. Safeway, Kroger, and Albertsons and if places like Homeshop, Peapod, and Webvan are still around, they do a similar thing. I suspect those chains only deliver in cities large enough to justify the cost of infrastructure, though.

I used to hate shopping with my grandmother, mom, aunt, and sister. It usually meant an all-day outing going to nearly every aisle of every store and lugging around incredible heaps of stuff. Endless eye-glazing hours. Much of it spent not actually buying anything, but just looking at things. It seems like it should qualify as a form of torture.

I loved to go shopping with my grandfather. Whether it was clothes, electronics, or groceries. We knew the layout of the store. We knew what we were going to get. We went in on one side of the store and efficiently navigated the quickest round through it to hit the areas we needed without wasting time in those that we didn't. We went down aisle, things went into the cart, we hit the checkout, and out to the car and back home.

As an adult, I'm the same way. The only difference is that I have the benefit of technology to make it even more efficient. Where the women in the family would have spent an hour or two grocery shopping and my grandfather and I would have spent thirty minutes, I'm able to spend five minutes. Login, click a button for the same order as last time, and answer the door the next day when they delivery it into my kitchen.

I have happily not been inside a mall in over a decade or a grocery store for almost a decade. It seems like such a small thing, but liberating yourself of some of those chores is so damn wonderful! Now, if only there were an alternative for doctor visits, so I didn't have to waste an entire day of my precious time to spend five minutes with my doctor.

Wow, if men weren't the target here, there might be accusations that it's sexist.

Anyway, you know what? I don't like to shop. That's why I buy my groceries online and my local store delivers them the next day. I spend five minutes to do it and someone else goes to the store and brings it to my kitchen, so I can avoid the driving, the parking, the lines, the kids, the checkouts, the bringing the groceries in. Same for as many other things as I can buy online instead of in person. Including (as much as possible) clothes.

See, I'm a male. I don't particularly care if I'm wearing the latest fashion or if I've adopted the Bieber haircut. It doesn't matter to me. I buy clothing that doesn't have logos or advertise anything on it. I like black clothing. I also don't like to waste time with hairstyles. I shave my head and have for over a decade. It saves me time and looks fine. Just like pants or slacks and a black shirt looks fine. Because, again, I don't build my entire life and self-esteem around what I look like.

As long as I look like I showered and didn't sleep in a gutter overnight, I'm fine. And, believe it or not, I've never had a woman give a damn about my shoes or the label on my clothing or whether my hair was feathered. They always want to know what I do for a living and what kind of car I drive and whether I own my own home and what part of town I live in and what school I went to and (in roundabout ways of asking) how much money I make. None have ever given a god damn about my clothing. And if they have, I didn't know about it and didn't care. And still don't.

Now, who's going to write the follow-up article about how Women Shouldn't Shop, because they don't know what they're doing when they're buying a new stereo or computer or television or car or other (insert stereotype).

Are you kidding? While we're a litigation-happy society, we are also entirely content with letting government and business trample all over us without raising an eyebrow, much less a finger.

We let companies get away with destroying the economy through sloppy and greedy irresponsible behavior and then we cover their asses by bailing them out. Because the committees that determine their bailing out are filled with former/current executives of the same companies they're bailing out (Goldman Sachs, for example).

We let companies stick dangerous and unproven chemicals in our food, soda, animals with little evidence that it's safe beforehand and little oversight afterhand, because the various government agencies (FDA, for example) are staffed primarily with executives of the companies that are trying to ram these things through (aspartame, roundup-ready seeds, rbgh in milk, etc).

We have food that is mass produced in conditions that are horrifying to anyone who, even if they love meat like I do, don't like to see living creatures abused and tortured in the process and that are filthy and commonly spread disease (that we see reports of all the time on the news when there are outbreaks and recalls), because the FDA and other agencies are - again - staffed with current/former executives of the biggest food manufacturers and processors in the world.

Hell, we even have government officials shutting down public run juvenile rehabilitation centers so that private ones can take their places and then those private companies paying judges directly to incentive's them to send juveniles to jail. I forget where this was (the northeast is what I remember), but a couple years ago it was huge news and it actually happened. The judge in question (and there may have been more than one) received millions of dollars in payola from the private prison industry system that built the juvenile detention centers. As a result, the judge just kept sending kids there. First time offenders. Kids who did very little to deserve it (get in a fight at school, use foul language, skip school) would get about two minutes of face time with the judge before he sentenced them to the facility. And once at the facility, they would keep kids indefinitely, until they said it was time to go. So a two week sentence could turn into a year. (Oh, found the story: http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/02/13/us-crime-usa-judge... -- "Two judges pleaded guilty on Thursday to accepting more than $2.6 million from a private youth detention center in Pennsylvania in return for giving hundreds of youths and teenagers long sentences.")

So if we know all of these things and we don't care (I'm sipping on a diet coke and eating a processed microwave burrito right now, for example), why should I expect that people are going to give much more concern to their privacy or the liberties of anyone else around them? Unless they think you're taking jesus away from them, cheap gasoline away from them, or their $5 latte away from them, or their favorite television show away from them . . . they don't fucking care.

Not only don't they care, but a big percentage will always play the role of apologist. For anything. FBI pouring through your personal information, using your geolocation data. Whatever it is, the complaining voices are always few and the people taking action even fewer.

Oh, great. As if I don't have enough things on my to-do list. Now I have to try this "shower" thing.

(Also, I seem to be really sparse in the idea department. Or rather, in the interesting idea department. I've spent most of the last decade stumbling onto ideas that I could immediately dismiss as being too obvious to be interesting, whether or not they could be financially rewarding, or already done by someone else. There needs to be some sort of affordable R&D/think-tank outsourcing you can do if you're a one or two man job looking for ideas - heh.)

I didn't see taxes mentioned. Portland is a fantastic place for technology, but you're looking at very high taxation and the city government is rather anti-business. Great place to live, otherwise, though. Especially if episodes of Portlandia don't turn you off (because after 30 years, I can tell you that they're not far off from the truth).

That isn't the point they're making here, though. They're comparing the valuation with the size of the user base. For example, at $3b for LinkedIn, divided by the number of users they have, it comes to about $33.33 per user. In other words, a sort of very rough market valuation of what the industry thinks the users are worth, I suppose.

Because you can use that shell of plastic and glass to take your kids to school, go to the grocery store and haul your groceries back home, go to the building supply store and haul the supplies you need to build a deck on your house home, go out of town on a vacation, tow your boat to the marina to go enjoy a weekend at the river, have transportation to take someone to the hospital if there is an emergency and so on.

And, most importantly, have a way to transport yourself from one place to another without having to deal with young thugs and punks, junkies blasted out of their mind, people selling you stuff, crazy people hassling you, loud people, smelly people, annoying people, and generally being able to avoid the dregs of society.

Public transportation is wonderful, in theory. One of the best cities that has nailed it properly is Portland, Oregon. However, public transportation is still public transportation and as much as I truly detest the act of driving and the wasted expense of a vehicle, I detest having to deal with loud obnoxious high school kids every day, the crazy people who won't stop scratching themselves and urgently talk to you about government conspiracies or aliens when you want to rest, people shooting heroine in the seat across from you, people and their enormous brood of children out for a trip, people who haven't showered in months brushing up against you and violating your nostrils, fights and other miscellaneous violence and . . . far more than I detest a car and an auto insurance payment.

Oh, and of course cities that are only now really being modernized and coming into their own will be more advanced and well thought-out. Let's, see, which will be better . . . A place whose infrastructure and architecture and contents were built up fifty to two hundred years ago using the newest technology of the day? Or, for example, a city in China being built up with the newest technology and benefits of 2011 -- with little to nothing to have to demolish before doing so?

Employers can fire you at-will, without cause, in America. It is traditionally considered good practice for an employee to give an employer two weeks notice before quitting a job, so that they have time to try and fill your position. It is not the case the other way around. If your company decides they need to trim the ranks tomorrow, you may walk in at 9:00am and be told you are no longer needed and escorted out of the building by security with a box of your belongings at 9:05am. The only protections are that you can not be fired do to discrimination based on gender, age, religion, or ethnicity. In some states, you can not be fired over sexual orientation (but in about 30 of the 50 states, that is not protected and you can therefore be fired for being gay).

The protections are rather meaningless, however. How are you going to prove that you were fired because you are too old or because you're a woman or because you aren't the right religion, if your employer says "no, we just fired her because she smelled really bad" or "we fired her for her poor work performance".

Of course (other than protecting against discrimination), I'm not sure what the alternative is. If I'm writing the paychecks, I should be able to determine how many people I need in my company and when I no longer need them -- whether due to finances or simply not liking them. Why should I be forced to keep someone on the payroll for weeks or months beyond when I can afford them or be forced to deal with someone in the office for weeks or months after they have worn out their welcome?

My employer is free to hire or fire me at will and I'm free to find another job. They're private entities with obligation to provide for me or look after my well-being.

I know there are other differences, too. For example, in America, we consider vacation time to be something for professionals who have put in their dues while paid vacation seems to be issued to employees along with their office chair straight out of the gate in a lot of other countries. My mother is in her fifties and still has no paid vacation at her work. If she were to come visit me, she would have to take time off of work (meaning a big hit to the pay check for that month). Same goes for both of my siblings.

On the other hand, a professional with fifteen or twenty years of experience and a college degree can earn ten days of vacation per year, where I work (though not immediately, you only accrue vacation time fast enough to get two weeks a year of vacation once you have worked at this company for at least seven years). On top of that, we have six or seven company holidays (New Years, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas).

Again, I don't really have a problem with that, either. I mean, why should I get paid when I'm not working? If my employer wants to entice me to their company or keep me at their company and in high spirits by offering to pay me to take time away from work, then that's their decision and it's great. But I don't see a particular reason that they should be obligated to compensate me for time I'm not spending on them.

Slashdot's discussion of the Lastpass situation was titled LastPass Password Service Hacked and linked to an article at Kaspersky where their title said LastPass Probably Breached.

sigh

I hear people talk about how "RSS is so slow" all the time, but I still don't understand it. I see no failings or complaints about RSS. I get a headline and then I get an article. Are we talking speed between when content was generated and when it appears in an RSS feed? Honestly, I couldn't care less about that. I'll live if it takes fifteen minutes for an update to reach me. It's not like I'm getting a patient's live EKG readings via RSS.

As for yet another standardized API to replace it. As long as it provides the same functionality to all current services/devices that use RSS, that's fine with me. I would really prefer that it not be driven by Facebook and Twitter, however any more than I want Microsoft Office development teams driving the standardization of ODF.

I have no interest in ever directly using Twitter and there's not enough content on there for me to bother with any workarounds. I currently use RSS for the one Twitter feed I bother to follow and if they ever really do get rid of RSS for their site, I'll just stop using even that. Not that much of a loss.

My habits are such that if you don't offer RSS feeds of information I want, I probably won't ever get your information or go to your site. You're not going to sucker me into "visiting regularly", just because you don't offer an RSS feed. I'll just move on and get what I want somewhere else.

Yeah, I was going to mention FF4, but didn't want to start a browser preference war. Also, I tend to not be very impressed with things that only work (or work well) on one modern browser, but not others.

This is to be expected when you have ignorant people reporting on things that they are not willing to educate themselves about. Anyone who wrote sensational garbage about the LastPass event didn't bother to understand how LastPass works and what the real potential of any breach could be.

Frankly, it leaves me exhausted in the same way the regular stream of sensational ignorant responses to violent video games, boobs in video games, or explicit lyrics in music leave me exhausted. It's extremely difficult to fight an ignorant public being exploited by a willfully ignorant and sensationalistic media.

The likes of Tech Crunch et al who should be in a position to counter such mainstream media reactions and behavior are all too often, unfortunately, jumping right into the fray and showing that they can be just as counter-productive as any big old-media outlets.

Wow, that slowed my dual quad core system with 12gb of RAM and a 2gb ATI down to about 5 FPS.

The preferred solution would probably be an internal Jabber/XMPP solution run within and by your own company that you controlled access to so that your communications (between employes or customers) don't run through another company and you can develop all sorts of nice little utilities that your employees can interact with through the protocol (like, access to general bug# information through simple queries).

I would seriously question the integrity of any serious company's IT department if they just had everyone use AIM (the proprietary branded IM service -- not IM in general).

Thanks. I had seen someone else asking in the comments on that page about two form authentication with regard to this, but hadn't seen any further comments about who this may or may not affect at the time I read it. Of course, I went ahead and changed it anyway, since it was getting to be about time.

Your new TV only ruins them if it's running with the 120hz or 240hz smoothing interpolation turned on. Chances are, you turned that off as soon as you set your television up, just like I did.

There's no question that 24fps film looks awful using these gimmicks. The real question is will film running at a higher rate (like 48fps) will also look bad? I know that the show The Event seems to be filmed at a higher frame rate (it looks like it was filmed in Video rather than Film) and it is disconcerting to watch. It actually makes the acting look bad, which I don't think it would otherwise seem.

However, like 3D, it's now a gimmick that it is included on so many sets that you almost have to go out of your way to avoid buying one that has them.

Interesting, it isn't prompting me to do any such thing.

Anyway, since many are mentioning 1Password - I used that for a couple years and switched to lastpass, because I was tired of having to install plugins across all the browsers on a platform and then having to find workarounds with Dropbox for syncing on additional machines and the lack of a Windows client, when I'm stuck working on Windows.

Also, since I use two-factor authentication, I wonder if that's the reason they have not asked me to change my password?

I actually don't listen to music, very much. I was checking my last.fm tracking a couple weeks ago and if you average it out, I've listened to about one song per day for the last five years. Usually, I listen to podcasts or nothing at all. Very occasionally, maybe even just white/brown/pink noise.

Edit: Actually, I just realized that I do listen to some 'music'. I play EVE-Online which has an extensive in-game track of like six hours of ambient and sometimes techno-ish/industrial tracks that are perfect for thinking. Since I usually have the EVE client running in the background on any machine I'm on (never know when you might need to make a big Heavy Water trade in Jita for your player owned structures), I usually let the music play the entire time.

Exactly. Though I know everyone doesn't share this opinion, I believe that I'd rather hire someone with ambition and hunger and passion over someone with a piece of paper or a track record. Your history is important and can prove a lot and so can an education, but in the overall scheme of things, it means less than one might think. Count the number of greatest thinkers and successes who either never attended college or dropped out (from George Carlin who dropped out of the 9th grade to Bill Gates who dropped out of college).

Sometimes you need the guy with twenty years of project management experience and huge projects under him who can just jump in and grab the reigns and go from there. Sometimes it pays to take a chance on an eager person (of any age) who wants a shot. If it doesn't work out, you get rid of them. If it works out, you have a diamond in the rough.

And, as someone who was afforded that opportunity myself, there's no better learning experience than being in the real world and surrounded by incredible people. Part of what keeps me in the company and position I'm in is that I am surrounded by many of the people I've known for over a decade that are real powerhouses. They're smart as hell and work hard as hell and I am constantly challenged by them. They make me feel dumb and I'm better for it. I might have a better grasp of some common things a college graduate would walk away with, but I wouldn't trade it for anything and I think I'm a better employee now, because I was molded here and not in a class room.

Not that I have anything against "the system" or against "college boys" (well, maybe just a tiny little biase). I'm just a really huge fan of self-starters and nothing makes me as sentimental as stories of successful self-educated and self-motivated people.

I don't normally share much personal information for the same reason I post with a pseudonym, but I'd like to share a story with you about someone far less qualified than you with far less going for them than you that made something out of nothing. The short version of all this will be "If a jackass like me can get where I've gotten, then anyone can get anywhere.".

I dropped out of the ninth grade and by the time most of my peer group was packing for college, I was flying a thousand miles from home, to SF, with only the clothes on my back to sign a contract with Netscape. I had no formal education, no college, no diploma, and no family connections of any sort. Just an interest, ambition, work-ethic, and minor experience that I was able to cull from limited resources (an underfunded public school that still used Apple IIs, a single mom with three kids a low paying job and no child support, and a history of being a real legitimate troublemaker).

Through the iPlanet Alliance of the late 90s, I was able to parlay that into a career at Sun and I've made great money, worked with incredible people, made valuable contacts, and had the satisfaction of helping big companies and organizations around the planet do some pretty sweet stuff that, while meaningless to most of the world, makes me feel like I'm doing something important.

I don't have any specific steps that I can list out to take you from where you are now to where you want to be. Only a tale of my own path and what I found important and not so important along my way which will hopefully dispel many of your fears and self-criticism. I also don't want people to take my story as bragging. Seriously, please understand that I was the family's trouble making black sheep with little ahead of me as a teenager. I just want to convey to young people out there that you can do what you want, despite perceived hurdles. An expensive college education is valuable; not necessary. Connections and a well-off family are valuable; not necessary. Even something as simple as a high school diploma is valuable, but not necessary.

If I can get where I am (a good position to be in life, though nowhere near as awesome as most of the people reading this, I suspect) with all of those strikes against me, then you -- with some college and some startup experience -- can get where you want to be. You just have to build on your best traits, like having a strong work-ethic. Find something you enjoy doing and do it so well and with such obsessive gusto that people can't help but notice you. Even if it's in writing opinion pieces, writing code, advising startups on technical issues, helping in popular forums. Whatever gets some people to notice you. Get your foot in as many doors as possible. Even if it's only networking, for now. And when you get an opportunity, exploit the hell out of it.

Oh, and have balls. Seriously, it can pay to take brash and bold actions, in life. Especially when you're younger and the older folk can see you as a real bundle of potential just waiting for a nudge and a chance. (I think that when you're outside of your 20s, people start to react to that attitude with "if you were going to do something, you'd have already made your grand moves by now").

By brashness and exploiting opportunities, let me give a real brief example:

Before I went to SF, my only experience was - believe it or not - call center work. People called up and I helped them fix stuff. Mostly end users, even. Nothing complex and nothing that special. It paid less than $10/hr, had fairly high churn, and for a lot of people was a position they were filling because they had to fall back on something (that is, a lot of people working around me were in their 40s and 50s while I was not even drinking age and this was something they had fallen back on from something else).

For many, an apparently going-nowhere hole. For me? I worked hard. The job was very 9-5, but I worked well into the night as well as weekends and holidays. I took on jobs and tasks and projects that I didn't have to. I put out enough fires that I became the go-to guy when you wanted things done right. Some contacts I'd made through the job saw this pattern of behavior and after a year in this position, offered me an interview. Overnight, I dropped everything to take the interview away from home. Two weeks after that, I had emptied my apartment and left my town, family, and friends with literally nothing except the clothes on my back and $900 to my name. I moved to the bay area, where at the time getting a place to live was impossible. There were actually bidding wars for low end crappy apartments in average or worse areas of town. And there was me, with no real rental or credit history just getting started.

I was too focused on work to fight through the tape of getting someone to finally rent to me, so I lived at work, instead. I worked sixteen hour days plus weekends and holidays. I slept under my desk and lived out of the free vending machines and soda machines. I used the employee showers and since I didn't have a place nearby to wash clothes, I just kept buying more so I always had fresh clothes in the morning. Hell, there was a mixup with my first few checks, so for two of those first months, I didn't even have money. I remember one time I actually had to borrow $20 from a coworker just so I could get a cab to go to the DMV and get my ID.

Anyway, the point is - your lack of degree or resume doesn't have to stop you. None of what you listed has to. Put together a good resume that emphasizes your strengths (read up on writing a resume - there are ways to focus your resume if you have experience but no education or education but no experience and so on). Shop it around. Talk to as many people as possible. Build up a portfolio and reputation online that people can refer to and become familiar with you through. If there's a project you really dig, participate in it (you've probably seen recent articles on HN about how you can leverage your github records and open source experience on your resume). And if there's a place you really want to work or a particular project you really want to be part of, reach out to them.

Seriously. Read up on Twilio if that is an interest. Check out their rules and requirements so you can avoid hitting an obvious speed bump and get disregarded for ignoring something in their process -- but contact people there and tell them of your situation and ambition. Startup-ish companies are even more likely, I think, to appreciate ambition and work-ethic and enthusiasm over "but how many companies have you founded?" or "when did you get your degree?". Bigger companies are often far harder to approach, because they have rigid processes and discard applications over any minor deviation quickly. Frankly, I'm a bit lucky that I skirted that problem in my case, since I went to well established big companies with more corporate culture than startup culture.

Also, as jasonlotito points out in his comment here, the smartest people seem to have the least appreciation for themselves. That isn't just in this field. It's like that in all fields. The best people most often are the most self critical. Musicians, actors, writers, programmers, CEOs. Part of what makes these people the greatest is the fear that they're not. The fear that they are defrauding everyone and they've merely lucked into their situation and any day, someone is going to discover it and call them out on it. So they work hard to stay ahead.

This was long. I said I had a good work-ethic; not a sense of brevity. :D